2004-09-01 04:00:00 PDT Baghdad -- Islamic radicals in Iraq said they had executed 12 Nepalese hostages and placed video images of the deaths on a Web site Tuesday, in the first mass killing of foreign prisoners since the spate of kidnappings by insurgents began in April.

The video shows a masked man in military fatigues beheading a hostage who is lying blindfolded on dusty, gray soil. Eleven more prisoners are then killed by single shots to the back of the head as they lie face down in a row.

The Nepalese men, kidnapped sometime after Aug. 19 while traveling overland from Jordan to jobs in Iraq, were described by their Jordanian employer as cooks and cleaners. Nepal has no troops in Iraq, but the kidnappers had demanded it stop sending contract workers to the country, according to the BBC.

Nepal does not permit its citizens to work in Iraq, but 17,000 Nepalese are believed to have slipped into Iraq after stops in Jordan or Kuwait.

Nepalese officials were unable to independently confirm the deaths. Shayamananda Suman, the Nepalese ambassador to Qatar, said officials had sought in vain to work through Iraqi mediators to free the men. Nepal does not have a diplomatic presence in Iraq.

"The problem was that there was no communication from the other side," Suman told a television station in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal. "Nepalese officials had put a lot of efforts and had contacted Iraqi religious leaders to help release the hostages. It's very sad."

At least 80,000 foreigners, including Americans, are in Iraq working on U. S. government contracts, and tens of thousands of others are employed by the Iraqi government and private companies.

A statement claiming responsibility for killing the 12 Nepalese was posted by the Army of Ansar al-Sunna, a group that has claimed several terrorist strikes in northern and western Iraq.

The killings more than double the number of hostages slain in Iraq since April, when the abduction of foreigners and the display of their images on the Internet or on television and -- in 11 previous cases -- their executions, emerged as a prime tactic of some insurgents in Iraq.

The killings also underscored the peril facing two French journalists who have been threatened with death by their captors.

French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier traveled Tuesday to Jordan from Egypt, then returned to Egypt in an urgent effort to win support for the release of Georges Malbrunot, 41, and Christian Chesnot, 37. The two were kidnapped in mid-August on a chronically dangerous road south of Baghdad while heading toward Najaf.

Their captors, who call themselves the Islamic Army in Iraq, have threatened to kill the men unless France repeals a ban on Islamic head scarves and other religious apparel in its public schools. French officials refused to change the law and have marshaled a wide variety of Arab and Muslim groups to condemn the use of kidnapping to pursue political goals.

Violence broke out on another front today when gunmen opened fire in Baghdad on a convoy carrying former Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmad Chalabi in an apparent assassination attempt that wounded two of his bodyguards, Chalabi's spokesman said.

Chalabi, a one-time Pentagon favorite who fell out of favor with the United States, had returned to Iraq from Iran in August to face counterfeiting charges.

In another development, a political aide to Muqtada al-Sadr said Tuesday that the rebellious Shiite Muslim cleric was serious about renouncing armed insurrection in favor of joining Iraq's nascent political process.

"Now, we concentrate on the necessity of political action," Ali Yassiri said in a telephone interview, referring to elections set for January. "The main objective is to make the U.S. occupation withdraw and to cooperate with the other movements and any other side that adopts a political project."

For the second time in two days, Yassiri suggested that al-Sadr would convert his militia, the Mahdi Army, to peaceful purposes. He was speaking less than a week after the end of a three-week battle with U.S. forces in the southern city of Najaf that killed hundreds of the militia's fighters.

It remained unclear whether Yassiri spoke for al-Sadr, a mercurial and lately reclusive figure whose many aides sometimes contradict one another.

In a bid to make peace more attractive, a group of senior Iraqi officials spent much of the day with tribal leaders of Sadr City, promising hundreds of millions of dollars in investment if the impoverished Baghdad neighborhood was calm enough to ensure workers' safety.